Leaders generally get an outsized share of blame and an outsized share of credit for results that become apparent on their watch. I agree that Microsoft didn't suddenly turn 180 degrees the day Nadella took charge.
As for the phone though? Microsoft lost that one a long time ago. They can/should continue to milk other client cash cows and continue with other businesses like Xbox that are peripheral but they're well-established in. But phone would require an all-in push and it's hard to see how that would make sense for Microsoft as a distant #3.
Focusing on Azure doesn't preclude them doing something like that of course; Microsoft's a big company. But I can't fault them from deciding that they largely missed mobile and moving on. (I'm unconvinced Surface and Hololens will amount to anything significant either but I don't really see those as a focus.)
Oh Phones are gone. Finito. But they weren't a few years ago. They were taking a sharp incline with the 9xx range of Lumias in Europe, and they only declined when Microsoft whipped all Lumias from stores and released nothing for a year, the 950 range, which they stopped supporting before they'd even stopped selling it. W10M is effectively still in beta and there are no phones to use it now.
But in the meantime they'd been pushing Continuum, W10/Phone integration, UWP, Xbox/Phone integration and so on. So removing phones tarnished a large chunk of their product line imo. Same for the Band. There's no competitor to it, still, and it's also gone. Same for Kinect. Same for Onedrive subscriptions, etc etc.
This is what worries me about Nadella's MS and it's the same thing that worries me about Cook's Apple...treating the product line like commodities without acknowledging the importance of the ecosystem.
Having said that, as you say, they're a big company. My perspective is solely from that of a devices user.
>Oh Phones are gone. Finito. But they weren't a few years ago.
I doubt he had much choice. WP can't exist just for the sake of it. Yes they were increasing market share, but at what cost? If you're losing money on each phone sold and if the amount you're losing is linear with each sale because you're effectively buying the sales, selling more is a road to catastrophe. Gaining WP market share would only be worthwhile if there is a path to profitability. I don't know this was the situation for a fact, but it seems likely.
>...treating the product line like commodities without acknowledging the importance of the ecosystem.
Right, so the argument is WP was worth subsidizing because it supports the rest of the ecosystem. But suppose supporting the rest of the ecosystem was better served by integrating it with competitor's products? Hence Office for iOS, etc. At which point WP just becomes a boat anchor round their necks. I don't think there was any possible future in which it was worth the costs.
In your analysis dropping the product was irrational. I don't think it was, but must admit I'm only speculating as to the reasons. I'd love to know the reality.
Well to be more precise, I suppose my position is that if MS want to increase their product userbase, they need a vanguard of advocates who promote their products far and wide. In the early days of Apple's resurgence, this would've been the graphic designers, musicians, developers, and so on. I think that the advocates that have pushed new MS products are, again, developers and graphic designers and so on, who have transitioned to MS over the last 4 or so years due to their new products suiting their needs (digitizer etc).
My own perception is that their haphazard treatment of their product line has tarnished the sentiment in these communities. It's one thing to phase out phones, but to suddenly drop them in the same year as an amazing keynote in which they promoted the Band and Phones as being central to the platform, at the same time that you're pushing OS updates...it's not pleasant when you've bought into that vision.
Phones might not have been worth the cost in an accounting sense, but if they've lost platform advocates then it could affect their good progress.
Like you though, I'm just speculating and would love to know the politics behind it.
They are doing ok with hybrid tablets though. Here in Germany it started to be more common to see hybrid tablets with W10 than Android on the retail stores.
So I still have some (tiny) hope of them succeeding with phablets with SIM card on them.
In any case, I am more willing to just adopt one of my Lumias when my S3 dies, than sponsoring OEMs that never update their devices.
Here in Europe I see Surfaces at every retail store, while Chromebooks tend to only be available online, sometimes I do spot one on the stores.
However I don't like them, personally I think they could have been a better proposal if Google had decided to leverage Dart, and offer a Smalltalk environment on them. Even if that required some kind of developer mode.
As it is, my trusty Eee PC 1215B is what I use for travelling.
I suspect a lot more marketing/co-marketing dollars go into the Surface from Microsoft than go into Chromebooks from Google and the device manufacturers.
My sense is that education is the only market where Chromebooks have been pushed at all aggressively. Like many things Google does, it's not clear that they have a really fleshed out strategy for the Chromebook.
They're also not really targeted for doing local development though people do use them in various somewhat unnatural ways.
Although they can't do everything I can do on my MacBook, they're often suitable for my needs when traveling and I appreciate the small size of the Asus Flip.
The Chromebook is pretty much failing outside the US education market, where there were non-technical reasons behind its success. Also, schools don't buy them retail.
The OEM trend is to design for Windows 10 and then offer a version of the same hardware as a Chromebook. This is a tough sale as people expect Chromebooks to be cheaper but they are not.
[They are not cheaper for two reasons. (1) OEMs pay very little for Windows 10 and they get a lot of that back by bundling crapware. (2) The Chromebook adds costs in hardware qualification and drivers etc, plus stockkeeping, distribution and advertising costs. The advertising cost is significant because Microsoft provides 'advertising support' for ads that promote Windows, but not Chromebooks.]
EDIT
Chromebooks were cheaper, back in the days when Windows laptops had 4GB of RAM and hard drives. Today, cheap Windows laptops have 2GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB eMMC cards, so the Chromebook's price advantage has gone or even been reversed.
In any case, schools can easily set up Windows machines so that kids can ONLY run a browser and nothing else. See Windows 10 Education AppLocker.
By following Microsoft blogs, articles, BUILD presentations among other sources, I get the idea that this whole mess, going back to WP 7, was once again the result of their political wars between DevTools and Windows division.
As for the phone though? Microsoft lost that one a long time ago. They can/should continue to milk other client cash cows and continue with other businesses like Xbox that are peripheral but they're well-established in. But phone would require an all-in push and it's hard to see how that would make sense for Microsoft as a distant #3.
Focusing on Azure doesn't preclude them doing something like that of course; Microsoft's a big company. But I can't fault them from deciding that they largely missed mobile and moving on. (I'm unconvinced Surface and Hololens will amount to anything significant either but I don't really see those as a focus.)